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The question of complexity, as in what makes one language more 'complex' than another, is a long-established topic of debate amongst linguists. Recently, this issue has been complemented with the view that languages are complex adaptive systems, in which emergence and self-organization play major roles. However, few students of the phenomenon have gone beyond the basic assessment of the number of units and rules in a language (what has been characterized as 'bit complexity') or shown some familiarity with the science of complexity. This book reveals how much can be learned by overcoming these limitations, especially by adopting developmental and evolutionary perspectives. The contributors include specialists of language acquisition, evolution and ecology, grammaticization, phonology, and modeling, all of whom approach languages as dynamical, emergent, and adaptive complex systems.

The Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (CALC) series was set up to publish outstanding monographs on language contact, especially by authors who approach their specific subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on language diversification (including the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties of colonial European languages), bilingual language development, code-switching, and language endangerment. We hope to provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favor approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors’ own fields of specialization and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavor to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.

We are proud to add to our list Bridget Drinka's Language Contact in Europe: The Periphrastic Perfect through History. Few researchers have undertaken the daunting task that the author has embarked upon in this comprehensive book, namely to track down the origins of the periphrastic perfect construction in Europe (which is quite complex) and to trace its diffusion across the map, while at the same time assessing the role of language contact as an essential element in this development. The book takes a wide-angle perspective, spanning the geographical breadth of Europe – from Portuguese to Finnish, from Icelandic to Bulgarian – and it delves into the 2,500-year-old history of the perfects and resultatives on this continent. Besides large-scale developments, Drinka also focuses on the micro-level responses to these “macro-historical processes”: she documents not only the movement of innovations across a population, such as the spread of HAVE-resultatives from German into the West Slavic languages, but also the role of the individual speaker as the transmitter of change. She presents, for example, the remarkable case of the Aragonese scribe who, in May 1147, switched from Visigothic to Caroline script, signaling not just a change in the scribal tradition but also an entire realignment of cultural allegiance toward trans-Pyrenean norms. This realignment is also reflected in the increased use of BE perfects in this area. The role of sociohistorical events as actuators of change is one of the strengths of this book.

Drinka adduces extensive empirical evidence to support her striking – and undoubtedly controversial – conclusions concerning the origin and spread of the perfects.

The series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (CALC) was set up to publish outstanding monographs on language contact, especially by authors who approach their specific subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on language diversification (including the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties of colonial European languages), bilingual language development, code-switching, and language endangerment. We hope to provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favor approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors’ own fields of specialization and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavor to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.

We are very proud to add to our list Carmen Silva-Corvalán’s Bilingual Language Acquisition: Spanish and English in the First Six Years. The author provides detailed analyses of language development data collected over several years from two siblings who happen to be her own grandchildren. She compares the data and her findings with those of other English-Spanish bilingual children reported in the literature, and with other interesting cases involving other languages, such as the Cantonese-English bilingual children that were the focus of a previous publication in the CALC series: The Bilingual Child by Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews (2007). Thus the book provides findings that facilitate informed comparisons that raise questions about universals of bilingual language development and the role of the social environments provided by the home and the extended family in determining ecology-specific peculiarities.

Jürgen Meisel's (JM) article is literally thought-provoking, especially for the issues that one can raise out of the central position that he develops, viz., “although bilingual acquisition in situations of language contact can be argued to be of significant importance for explanations of grammatical change, reanalysis affecting parameter settings is much less likely to happen than is commonly assumed in historical linguistics” (p. 142). This is a position that calls for grounding language change, hence historical linguistics, in the pragmatics/ethnography of language practice, a question that linguists can continue to ignore no more than the actuation question (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 1968; McMahon, 1994; Labov, 2001; Mufwene, 2008). The latter regards what particular ethnographic factors trigger particular changes at particular places and at particular times but not at others. In other words, do structural changes happen simply because they must happen or because particular agents are involved at specific times under specific ecological conditions of language practice?

Although the emergence of creoles presupposes naturalistic SLA, current SLA scholarship does not shed much light on the development of creoles with regard to the population-internal mechanisms that produce normalization and autonomization from the creoles’ lexifiers. This is largely due to the fact that research on SLA is focused on individuals rather than on communities of speakers producing their own separate norms, whereas genetic creolistics deals precisely with this particular aspect of language change and speciation. It is not enough to prove that transfer from the first to the second language is possible and can evolve into substrate influence on the emergent vernaculars—transfer is not ineluctable and varies from one learner to another. Additionally, how and why particular features of some speakers spread to a whole population (or to parts thereof), whereas others do not, must be accounted for. Consistent with colonial socioeconomic history, the gradual emergence of creoles suggests a complex evolution that cannot be accounted for with simplistic invocations of either interlanguage or relexification. This article presents limitations in the cross-pollination that has been expected from genetic creolistics and research on SLA.

The series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (CALC) was set up to publish outstanding monographs on language contact, especially by authors who approach their specific subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on language diversification (including the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties of colonial European languages), bilingual language development, code-switching, and language endangerment. We hope to provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favour approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors' own fields of specialization and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavour to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.

We are very happy to add to our list Jan Blommaert's The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, an authoritative invitation to rethink linguistic communication in a world that has become increasingly interconnected, is marked by more and more mobility of both people and commodities (including language) as well as by socio-economic inequities, and is undeniably polycentric. Some hegemonic languages, chiefly English, have spread world-wide but have not only become ‘global’ but also indigenized, both adapted to new communicative habits and subjected to local norms. Consequently, their market values are not universally identical across national borders; in fact, not even within the same borders. It is more and more a question of whose English it is and where it is spoken.

The author wonders whether English is becoming as universal as is often claimed? Demand for English and American language centers has increased around the world, and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) is now administered regularly in many metropolises. To ensure that their students are competitive, economically affluent countries have invested lots of money in the latest audio-visual technology while also recruiting the most competent teachers of English as a second or foreign language. South Korea has stood out in contracting American and British teachers to provide interaction-with-native-speaker experience to its students via satellite while European countries have benefited greatly from student exchange programs that enable their students to improve their competence by immersion in native socio-economic ecologies. Equally noteworthy are financial and emotional sacrifices endured by many, chiefly Korean, families whose mothers/wives and school-age children live in Anglophone countries so that the children can develop native competence in English. The relevant parents assume that as the world-wide market value of English continues to rise, every young person anywhere will need it, at least as a lingua franca, and the more fluent ones will have a competitive edge over their peers. Pop culture will undoubtedly have contributed its share to this rise of its market value.

The series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact was set up to publish outstanding monographs on language contact, especially by authors who approach their specific subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on language diversification (including the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties of colonial European languages), bilingual language development, code-switching, and language endangerment. We hope to provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favour approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors' own fields of specialization and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavour to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.

We are very proud to add to our list J. Clancy Clements' The linguistic legacy of Spanish and Portuguese, a very informative account of, first, the evolution of Portuguese and Spanish from Latin and, then, their subsequent transformation into several non-European varieties. The general perspective throughout the book is that of colonial expansion, language spread, language contact, and language shift. Without explicitly espousing uniformitarianism, Clements highlights the role of substrate influence through naturalistic second language acquisition, as well as the particular ways in which the external ecologies of language contact variably constrain the significance of this particular factor, against inheritance from the lexifier, in the relevant evolutionary processes.

Peter Trudgill's account of new-dialect formation is uniformitarian, a position I have embraced explicitly since Mufwene 2001. In Mufwene 2006, I show how similar the mechanisms involved are to those that account for the emergence of creoles, the basic difference lying in the composition of the contact setting's feature pool (see also below). The position I defend is even less moderate, as I argue that in the history of humankind language speciation has basically been a consequence of how internal variation within a language has been affected by migrations of its speakers and additionally by the different contacts the relevant populations have had among themselves (Trudgill's position) and with speakers of other languages in their new, colonial ecologies (Mufwene 2005, 2007, 2008). The reader should not be surprised to see in this response comments that are primarily intended to support and complement the position of the target article.